Sean Scully

Sean Scully at the National Gallery of Ireland marks the artist’s 70th birthday.

Born in Dublin, Scully, now living and working in New York, retains a powerful sense of Irish identity. He moved to New York at the end of the 1970s and established himself as one of the leading abstract painters of his time.

This exhibition charts the two decades – the 1980s and 1990s – in which Scully established his international reputation, with major exhibitions in Europe and America, and important paintings entering the leading museums of modern and contemporary art. Responding to minimal art of the 1960s and 1970s, Scully has always striven to associate emotions and phenomena of the world into his art, resisting formalism while rigorously reducing the means he employs – a reduced palette of colours and restricting himself to patterns of vertical and horizontal stripes. Scully has always managed to introduce extraordinary variety into his paintings, while their titles often hint at associations with his life or surroundings.

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland brings together a group of major paintings from the period 1980-2000 on loan from Tate, Arts Council England, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kerlin Gallery, as well as works on paper from a private collection. It will also feature a single recent ‘window’ painting as a response to the earlier ‘White Window’, and a new photographic work in ten parts.

Curator: Sean Rainbird, Director, National Gallery of Ireland.